Veeam Software Adds Capacity Planning To Virtualization Portfolio

Veeam Software has been making a name for itself with VMware and Microsoft virtualization solution providers, and now it's adding a new virtual management function to its arsenal.

Veeam next month will add advanced capacity planning to its Veeam ONE suite, a set of management tools designed specifically for VMware environments that also includes monitoring, change management and reporting and chargeback features.

Veeam ONE scans virtual infrastructure, identifies potential capacity problems and offers recommendations for configuration changes and for hardware provisioning. Veeam already offered basic capacity planning but is now stepping up this functionality.

Doug Hazelman, senior director of product strategy at Veeam Software, says the idea is to help organizations adjust to quickly changing conditions in the data center and get the most out of their virtualization investments.

"From a technology standpoint, virtualization management is all about either adding or re-allocating resources," Hazelman said in an interview. "This also gives you the ability to plan ahead for budgeting purposes."

Veeam ONE is available as a native solution for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager and HP Operations Manager, and also comes as a standalone product. In addition to monitoring, Veeam ONE includes Veeam Reporter, which scans and analyzes virtual infrastructure, and Veeam Business View, which manages clusters, hosts, virtual machines and data stores from an organizational perspective.

"Our approach is to take a very detailed look at the virtualized infrastructure, but we don’t tie that back to application performance," Hazelman said.

While System Center Operations Manager can gather application data and provide it back to application owners to take corrective action, it's missing all of the VMware data, and that's where Veeam fills the gap.

Veeam ONE's ability to automatically gather data from VMware environments and bring it into System Center makes it a strategically important tool for Microsoft, and for other large vendors like HP, IBM, CA and BMC, according to Hazelman. Veeam is an Elite VMware Technology Alliance partner and also a Microsoft Gold partner.

"If you look at some of the big vendors, they've always been about management in a heterogeneous environment. But these companies aren't always quick to develop new technology," Hazelman said. "Virtualization has happened extremely fast, faster than the big companies can react."

Veeam was founded in 2006 by the founders of Aelita Software, a company that focused on Windows Server management solutions before being acquired by Quest Software in 2004. In 2008, Veeam acquired nworks, adding technology that bridges the gap between VMware and enterprise management systems from Microsoft and HP.

Veeam now has 19,000 customers, many of which focus on backup and replication, Hazelman said. "Several enterprise customers are using our solution to manage VMware through Microsoft System Center and HP Operations Manager," he said.

Veeam's Americas headquarters is in Columbus, Ohio, and the company also has offices in suburban London and Sydney, Australia. The company has a 100 percent channel model and goes to market through the same distribution and reseller channels as VMware, Hazelman said.